Some Thoughts on Viriconium

M. John Harrison is one of those writers that I knew on paper I should fall in love with but hadn’t properly tried. Up until last year I’d been a big fan of his blog and his tweets but hadn’t read much of his fiction other than The Centauri Device. Then I got gifted a copy of Wish I Was Here and couldn’t help but devour it over the course of a couple of afternoons. (I reviewed it here.)

I was sold on M. John Harrison, so I decided to finally get started with the Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of Viriconium stories that I bought myself last year.

It’s an incredibly varied body of work with a lot to offer, and that asks a lot of questions. At no point did Harrison condescend to my expectations. Not every story hits, but that’s as much down to my reading comprehension as it is anything else, I think. I imagine these stories would be similarly rich on re-reading as Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books are supposed to be.

As has become my habit with these collections and anthologies I end taking notes story by story. I’ll post those raw notes, slightly edited, below the break, and then continue my discussion after.

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Viriconium Knights

Why do I get the feeling that the tapestry is obliquely showing me important plot points?

The Pastel City

Like a heroic fantasy adventure inside a T.S. Eliot poem. The vibe here is impeccable. Harrison really goes out of his way to portray a world being scoured by a wind only moving in one direction; capital T Time, before pulling the rug and demonstrating that even at the end of Time, change is possible, is in fact the only constant. I think writing a fantasy novel about a swordsman who refuses to name his sword is hilarious. I just love the way he writes – I love the vocabulary, I love the odd choices of words. Gene Wolfe uses a similar technique in The Book of the New Sun. If you want to make it strange, writing about it strangely will go a long way.

Lord of Misrule

You don’t have to go to the end of time to meet sad people full of memories.

Strange Great Sins

Strange indeed. Is there a greater sin than not becoming yourself?

A Storm of Wings

Even sadder and more elegiac than usual. I miss tegeus-Cromis. So do a lot of people. The world, failing to end, undergoes a mutation. Filled with weird architecture you’ll struggle to imagine.

The Dancer from the Dance

Weird things happening on the heath.

The Luck in the Head

I could bound myself in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The Lamia & Lord Cromis

Fate exists and you could not possibly guess at it.

In Viriconium

We spend more time in Viriconium than in any other story, and what a run down, claustrophobic place it is.

A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium

You always suspected that Viriconium could be anywhere or anywhen.

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I noticed as I was reading these stories that I was tracing the dying earth subgenre of SFF backwards. Or science fantasy, if you wanna call it that. I read The Book of the New Sun a few years ago and had never read anything like it, but knew you could follow it back to Jack Vance and The Dying Earth. The thread runs through Viriconium.

Opening this collection with Viriconium Knights is a smart move, I think. It drops you right it and disorients the hell out of you in terms of the setting, the characters, the way people view the world and how they speak to each other. It’s a concentrated hit. I didn’t understand the significance of the metal bird at the time, but having read Wolfe and been annoyed with myself at totally missing the significance of Dr. Talos’ play in Claw of the Conciliator, I was primed when the old man showed Ignace Retz the tapestry. Re-reading it quickly as I write this, it is a terrible echo, ever so sad; the first time I just nodded my head and knew what to expect.

I don’t know if Harrison arranged the stories or if that choice was made by an editor, but I think it’s significant that the stories from Viriconium Nights were broken up and arranged around the three novels, and not put in as their own block in the same order as published. Viriconium Knights would have one effect reading it after tegeus-Cromis has departed the stage, a nice little callback, do you remember that character? He was swell, wasn’t he? Placing it here, first, an echo of a thing that hasn’t happened yet, deprives you of that feeling of warmth and just highlights the disconnect, the instability of time and identity within these stories.

If The Pastel City was the only Viriconium thing then it would stand very well on its own as a great novel and fine addition to the genre. It’s an epic adventure story that subverts as many ideas and tropes inherent to epic adventure stories as it can, and even has some horror elements. (Thinking about it a lot of these stories have horror elements.) It’s a quest narrative where the quest only obliquely gets fulfilled and the hero is a master swordsman who refuses to name his sword and prefers to think of himself as a poet. The novel is written like the novelist prefers to think of himself as a poet. I mentioned it above, that using weird, archaic language can create that sense of strangeness.

(This extends even to the colours. I learned so many new words for colours reading these stories. Make it new!)

I just came across (here) an old essay of Harrison’s on the idea of worldbuilding. I think this quote is particularly edifying;

Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain

Harrison is writing a kind of post-structuralist fantasy, writing a constantly shifting city into existence by relying on the constant shift of language, asking the reader to do a lot of the work knowing full well every reader “reads” a different text into existence.

In Wish I Was Here, Harrison talks a lot about T.S. Eliot – I thought as I was reading the Viriconium stories that it was like a fantasy novel set inside an Eliot poem, but it goes deeper than that imagery. Harrison is as disobliging as Eliot. Eliot expects you to be familiar with so much stuff outside of his text to be able to fully grok it, Harrison does likewise. Harrison even quotes directly from The Waste Land without citing it, a few times actually, in much the same way Eliot doesn’t let you know when he’s copped something from Fraser, or Shakespeare. It’s poetry, innit.

Which is all to say that I adored The Pastel City, that if you were writing a fantasy novel just for me, just to appeal to my own interests and predilections, you would write The Pastel City.

The short stories that in this collection begin to serve as connective tissue are even more oblique, and I’m going to have to re-read them, I think, to have the same relationship with them that I developed with the novels. Some of the imagery starts repeating, like the Mari Lwyd.

A Storm of Wings is an odd one. In a world that is kind of already post-apocalyptic, but has reached a kind of equilibrium, what does the end of the world look like? It’s something totally alien, totally unimaginable, and it’s far enough in the future that our hero, tegeus-Cromis, has passed, and we must deal with it ourselves. A lot of the characters are heard aloud wishing for the return of their poet-cum-swordmaster in a way that probably echoes what the general reader is thinking. Instead we’re given; a rogue, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and is losing their grip on reality, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and *has* lost their grip on reality, and Tomb the dwarf, so that at least we’re not totally alienated, because despite me using words like “post-structuralist” to describe these stories, they are still stories, and Harrison knows what he is doing.

Harrison isn’t too arch to give us what we want, he just isn’t gonna do it in a straightforward way. The Lamia & Lord Cromis is another quest narrative, because that’s the kind of context that tegeus-Cromis belongs in. Lords of his house are fated to have to find and slay a rare beast, the eponymous Lamia. He does, eventually, do this, but it doesn’t bring him the fulfilment he expects, and I think him losing a ring in the same swamp that he loses one of Queen Jane’s in The Pastel City is interesting. tegeus-Cromis is directly engaging with his fate in this story, but not in the way he thinks.

(I just want to point out that even in giving us what we want, Harrison doesn’t. tegeus-Cromis spends a lot of The Pastel City brooding over his dead sister, in what I imagine might be a reference to Elric, but Harrison doesn’t use the prequel story to show us that loss, or bring tegeus-Cromis’ sister on stage for cheap dramatic irony. Remarkable restraint.)

By this point, and leading into the next novel, I was really noticing what Harrison wasn’t showing us, what he refuses to explain. There is plenty of advanced technology like airships, power armour, and laser swords, that he doesn’t explain, and doesn’t have the characters theorise about in-text either. The stuff just is, like stuff in real life just is. The way he describes the radiation from these technologies is cool (again, he’s not *against* the reader, he’s just not doing it all for them), they give off motes of white and purple light. In Viriconium, the last Viriconium novel, has a plague that is never explained, only its effects shown, that of sapping the will, the creative energy, the life force, of the city.

I actually had a moment reading this one where I thought, “I wonder what it’s like to live through a plage?” It took me a few moments, but I realised I had. And it had had a similar sapping effect on my energies, my life force. I know some people managed to have incredibly creative quarantines; I felt like such a dick because I didn’t. On paper it sounded perfect. My wages were getting (mostly) paid, and I had to stay home. The perfect time to work on that novel. I ground away at it and just felt miserable. None of it came easy. I kept a journal on and off. I’m glad I tried to keep myself busy and have some material to show for it, but it’s hard to look back at it as a particularly fruitful period.

(“Why won’t Harrison explain the plague?” I wondered to myself, as if anyone ever fully explained COVID.)

The protagonist, Ashlyme, a painter, has a friend who is also an artist and who is suffering from the plague. Ashlyme recognises his friend, Audsley King, as a great painter, but struggles to understand her recent work or why she choses to wallow in the plague zone instead of getting out and lapping up the adulation she surely deserves. Audsley has no interest in the praise of people she does not respect. This friction animatesthe whole story and the plague is just a backdrop. The stuff with the secret police, and the twins; I’m sure they represent the city, but otherwise am having trouble reconciling that subplot with the story as whole. Which might be the point. Art has contradictions and unreconcilable parts. Does some of this speak to Harrison’s attitude to the Viriconium stories as a whole? I think so, at least a bit.

The last story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, is a gear shift, set as it is in our world, among our people, some of whom have been to Viriconium before, some of whom want to visit for the first time. It’s an interesting contrast – what makes one story set in grimy cafes with a cast of weird people a fantasy and what makes another story set in grimy cafes among weird people not a fantasy story? Is it just the names? Some pretty weird names in this one, but then some of it takes place in York. Is Viriconium a place or a state of mind? I don’t know how I feel about this story, haven’t come to a nice conclusion. I just have questions and ideas I’ll be happy to think about every now and again until I eventually re-read these stories and maybe glean a bit more.

I’ve always enjoyed the modernist bent in SFF, the New Wave stuff, the exploration of inner space. Having read this and The Book of the New Sun, I’m thinking about how some of those other modernist ideas and ways of working leaked into the fantasy side of SFF, as a way of providing a kind of jungle gym for the reader’s mind. I came away from Viriconium with a lot of things to think about and a huge list of vocabulary to look up.

I love a book where I can feel myself becoming a better writer as I read it. The way Harrison constructs his worlds and stories looks so maximalist, and on closer inspection is so deliberate and restrained. Sometimes there is an impulse to explain every cool idea you have, and it is so satisfying to be trusted as a reader to fill in gaps, to be left space enough for a world to grow in me. Viriconium is ever changing in the stories, and is ever changing in my own mind and in the minds of everyone else who reads it.

Viriconium!

So, I Joined a Dungeons & Dragons Group

And I’m loving it.

We’ve only had two sessions so far but I’m having a blast. I’ve rolled myself up (ok, stat arrayed myself up) a human barbarian who is totally not Conan. In fact, I’ve accidentally reverse engineered Conan. I designed a guy with a mercenary/military background, who has a really sharp sense of fairness, and who now wanders the land until he witnesses an injustice, where he will, with a cold rage, despatch the people who would exploit and abuse those weaker than them.

A bit like Jack Reacher.

Who is pretty much Conan the Barbarian.

Oh well.

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I’ve had an interest in D&D ever since I played the original Baldur’s Gate, along with the other Infinity Engine games Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment, and learned about the ruleset behind all the mechanics. What the hell is THAC0? Why is a lower number better for armour? I didn’t really have an appreciation of what tabletop D&D looked like. I didn’t know any elder nerds who could guide me. I hung around at the Games Workshop a bit, and I collected and painted a bit of 40k, but otherwise D&D was mostly a computer game thing for me.

Some friends and I got invited to join a tabletop group when I was in my late teens. They were playing 3.5e. We were joining to replace some players who left, I think? I just remember being given a character that someone had been playing before me. It was a dwarven monk that was basically fitted out to wrestle things to death, and also, he was mute.

I can’t imagine how *annoying* that must have been for the DM. This was my first ever TTRPG experience, and I was having to figure out the 3.5e grapple rules. Yeah.

Had loads of fun though. I remember nothing about that campaign, except, through a combination of careful argument and good rolls, one of the other players launching me in the air to grapple with a dragon.

Oh, I also remember how frustrating it was not to be able to speak. The group had decided on an RP thing before I joined where another player knew sign language and so did I, so I could “talk” directly to him, and then he’d relay it to the group. The DM eventually took pity on me and decided to give me back my power of speech through a demonic bargain with what turned out to be the BBEG. I can’t remember if the debt ever got called.

It annoys me that I can’t remember anything about this campaign, and I daren’t have a look at any of my journals from this time. This was a period in my life where I was otherwise Not Happy. My journals probably don’t have anything about this campaign anyway. Probably just complaining about a girl.

So this new group, this new campaign, I am determined to take lots of notes. I’ve got a nice fresh notebook I am using exclusively to capture our tabletop sessions, and I am recording the dates and session numbers. I am not logging every action, just taking general notes the way I am trying to in other contexts in my life. (See my post on keeping a journal, and keeping a reading journal. I really need to get on my post about keeping a commonplace book).

I am also considering taking part in this group to be storytelling practise; D&D is just storytelling after all. The rules give it structure and the dice give it a frisson of unpredictability, but really, what you’re doing is telling a fantastic story with a group of friends. I’ve enjoyed the fantasy I have read (Book of the New Sun was boss and of course I love Tolkien), and I’ve got more on my shelves too read, but I’ve never really tried writing it.

So I’m writing up my notes from my character’s perspective. A bit of backstory, too, but I intend to flesh that out more as the campaign goes on. I’ve been reading up on West Marches campaigns and I really like the idea that it can be really valuable to your group to keep a record, but it can also be fun to see how you’ve perceived events, what was important to you and what wasn’t.

I also really, really like Scott Hanselman’s ideas about not wasting your keystrokes. I absolutely see the value in writing something up just for myself, but if I intend to share it, I could just share it among the WhatsApp group, or I could put it up on a blog to make it more accessible and allow other people to possibly get some enjoyment out of it too.

So that’s what I’ve done. You can read it here. There should be a new post every couple weeks. I’ve put it on a separate blog because I’m not sure the people who read this one (all three of you) are interested in a D&D 5e campaign journal. But hey, if you are, let me know, I haven’t spent any money and could always change where I’m posting. I’ll probably be writing a bit more about D&D on this blog anyway, as it pertains to SFF, as I want to do something on Appendix N/E.

I’m already having to stop myself buying a new set of dice every week, and am thinking about maybe running my own game for my family. Soon I’ll be looking at new games. There are some Fallout TTRPG systems I’d like to try…

Some Thoughts on William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy

I read Virtual Light in… 2020? 

*checks Goodreads*

I was reading it towards the end of 2020 and finished it on January 8^th 2021, and I can remember absolutely nothing about it except the names of the main characters, broadly who they are, and then of course the actual main character, The Bridge. I was recently in the mood for some William Gibson again as it’s been a while, and I’d bought Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties for 99p each on Kindle. Here are some quick thoughts, very quick, because I have some things I want to say and cannot think of a cohesive thread. 

• It didn’t matter that I couldn’t remember the plot of Virtual Light, and once I got to the bit in All Tomorrow’s Parties that brings up Skinner’s room, the important stuff came back to me anyway.
• I put off reading Idoru because I wasn’t interested in a novel about a virtual pop star. I should have remembered that William Gibson doesn’t just conceive of cool new tech, he conceives of how it will change everything. In one sense, Rei Toei is so far out of what we currently have, because she’s alive. In another sense, we’ve blown past Gibson’s conception of a virtual star. Never mind Hatsune Miku, anyone with a modest budget can be a VTuber. I ended up caring a lot.
• I do not expect hard SF from Gibson. He is a student of the New Wave and that’s great, I love the New Wave. That said, the way he explains the Idoru is just so handwavey it made my eyes roll. Some fudge about emergent systems. Maybe when it happens that’s the way it’ll happen, but I doubt it. 
• I really love all the stuff about autonomous zones, the Bridge, the Walled City. It’s just cool as hell. Different ways of living, different ways of thinking, it’s New Wave, it’s hip, it’s great. It’s that social thing, that’s what Gibson captures really well, better than anyone. 
• If you want me to be instantly interested in your novel, name it after a Velvet Underground song.
• When I think of the Bridge Trilogy now a couple of weeks after finishing it, I am astounded at how little I remember, and then I recall how little I remember of the Sprawl trilogy. My retention isn’t always great, but I genuinely think the plots in William Gibson novels are unimportant. It’s the change that is happening, or will happen, that’s important. 
• I remember vibes and themes. William Gibson is Raymond Chandler but he writes about computer stuff. Think about the fact that, when you’re reading a William Gibson novel, the plot is often moved forward by a guy bursting into a room with a gun. It’s classic noir. I’ve read plenty of Chandler and the shapes of his books in my memory are similar to the spaces Gibson’s inhabit. 
• I glanced at a review of All Tomorrow’s Parties that complained it had an anticlimactic ending. I disagree. A thinking, feeling computer program taking control of a global network of Star Trek replicators and using them to create biological forms for itself is not anticlimactic, it is in fact the paradigm shift the novel constantly talks about. Yes, the foreshadowing is heavy handed, but so are Gabriel’s trumpets. 
• Gibson has a fine understanding of how technology doesn’t change the world until your average guy on the corner can use it. Making Boomzilla a witness to the historic, nodal moment, is a great way of making that point. Something something unevenly distributed. 
• One way to stop your author self-insert getting on everyone’s nerves is to destitute him and make him live in a cardboard box in a train station. Absolutely. That’ll do it. 
• The other nodal guy, Harwood, and the assassin he hires, yeah they aren’t great characters and introducing them in the final novel to bring it all to a conclusion does kinda suck… but between Chevette, Rydell, and Laney, you are already getting way more good character stuff than you’ll usually get in a Gibson novel. Remember your Raymond Chandler. There’s Marlowe, there’s the guy who gets his face reconstructed, and then there’s… do you see what I mean?
• I am looking forward to starting the next trilogy. If Sonic Youth have written a song about your novel I am gonna wanna read it. I need to write an essay about the amount of literature rock music has introduced me to.
• I am very surprised to hear that Pattern Recognition features a main character whose talent involves being able to capture the zeitgeist. 
• It’s easy to sneer, but if you could do it the way Gibson can, then you’d be a great writer yourself. 
• William Gibson is a great writer. 

Some Thoughts on Elric of Melniboné

I’ve been interested in Michael Moorcock’s work ever since I read Behold the Man (and it totally blew up my conception of what SF is), as part of a module on SFF I took as an undergrad, but I’ve only recently gotten around to giving his work more proper attention. 

[Side note: If you’ve noticed, a lot of my posts begin with me discussing a first encounter during my undergrad SFF module… yeah, I loved that module and it rearranged my mind in the way nothing else did during my undergrad days. Thanks again and forever, Rose and Tom.]

My local library had the first two volumes of his collected stories as published by Gollancz, My Experiences in the Third World War and The Brothel In Rosenstrasse. I read both, and it was while I was reading Rosenstrasse that I realised Moorcock is even more incredible than I’d already given him credit for. To write in that many genres and modes and hit the mark most of the time… it’s not something everyone can do. I came to Moorcock interested in his SFF and ended up loving his *checks notes* historical erotica? Yeah, fair play. 

I also read The Final Programme. But, it was when I picked up and read an old Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks Elric collection that I’d had knocking around for ages that I realised this was gonna be my new favourite thing and I had to go and start from the beginning. 

I remember the passage in The Dreaming City that marked Moorcock as having created something really original. 

“He drew a great, sobbing breath and, blind misgiving influencing him, threw the sword into the moon-drenched sea. Incredibly, it did not sink. It did not even float on the water. It fell point first into the sea and stuck there, quivering as if it were embedded in timber. It remained throbbing in the water, six inches of its blade immersed, and began to give off a weird devil-scream – a howl of horrible malevolence.”

Elric by Michael Moorcock, pg 33, published by Gollancz, London 2001. ISBN 1 – 95798 – 743 – 8.

The Dreaming City is a great story up to that point, but it’s that passage, where Moorcock holds a hellish mirror up to the myth of Excalibur, that made me desperate to see what else Moorcock did in terms of Fantasy. 

It’s unsurprising for someone that’s been writing for as long as Moorcock has, but his bibliography is a mess of out-of-prints, reprints, ironically named definitive editions. I found a few helpful guides but in the end, the one that made me realise I should start with the newer Gollancz editions was this reddit post. 

So I picked up Elric of Melniboné and Other Stories, which consists of three main parts

• A story called Master of Chaos, a kind of prologue to the prologue which I enjoyed but get the feeling I’m not au fait enough with Moorcock yet to fully appreciate
• A script for a graphic novel called Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer
• A novella called Elric of Melniboné

The script is… a script. I’d probably enjoy the graphic novel, and the insight into Elric’s early life is interesting, but none of the threads develop enough for you to get really interested. Almost feels videogamey, seeing as Elric gets sent on three fetch quests. Me complaining about this is probably squaring the circle, seeing as everyone who worked on Baldur’s Gate probably read the Elric stories, but still, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. 

The novella, though, was great. It was what I’d come for. Palace intrigue, beautiful descriptions, brooding menace, and absolutely dripping with dramatic irony. For a start, Elric doesn’t have Stormbringer, Yyrkoon is around scheming, and Cymoril is begging Elric to kill or exile him because he is clearly plotting. There is a tragic energy to all this that I’d heard about, but isn’t present in The Dreaming City, and Elric’s doomed quest grips you from the moment he sets out. Everything is absolutely going to go wrong, but watching how many dodges Elric has in store for his fate is fascinating. 

Well, that or watching him trap himself further and further by his wriggling. Any story that makes you idly think about Big Questions like fate vs. free will without ever having anyone monologue about it or hit you on the nose about it is a good story. 

There is another great post here which discusses different approaches to reading the Elric stories, and which suggests that The Dreaming City, Elric’s not-so-triumphant return to Imrryr, is much more powerful if you read it knowing who all the characters are and what led Elric to leave Imrryr and return. I can see that point of view, and if I hadn’t read it first, I would have left it until later. But having read it first has not detracted from my enjoyment at all. Elric of Melniboné is full of sly winks and nods that assume the reader is familiar with Elric’s arc, which you would be if you’d read it in publication order. It leant a kind of Episode 1 feeling to proceedings. Anakin might intend to become a Jedi Knight, but you know he returns to Tatooine as Darth Vader. Elric might leave Imrryr intending to learn of the world and sow his wild oats, but you know he returns with a barbarian horde to sack the seat of his own empire.

Elric is just totally magnetic, utterly compelling. I want to know more about him and his history. I want to learn his fate.

I’d like to point out that Moorcock seems to have a talent for coming up with cursed, powerful objects. As if Stormbringer and Mournblade weren’t enough, the novella features the Mirror of Memory, a mirror that, you guessed it, steals people’s minds, and which gets weaponised into a kind of massive WMD by Yyrkoon. Oh, and there’s The Ship Which Sails Over Land and Sea, which, guess. Ok, he’s great at coming up with the objects but just very literal in naming them. And then every other proper name in his novels has three letter Ys in it. It’s just how he does things. 

I am totally on board with it. I’ve already picked up The Fortress of the Pearl and am a few chapters in, will surely have more to say once I’ve read some more Elric.